DailyTech has learned from industry sources that ATI, the graphics division of AMD, is working with its board partners and several major e-tailers to lower prices on some key products.

The ATI Radeon HD 4870 512MB will drop $50 in price, from the $199 segment down to $149. It will compete in this price point primarily against NVIDIA's GTS 250 1GB rebrand using the old G92 chip, variants of which were used in the 8800GT, 9800GT, 9800GTX, 9800GTX+, etc. However, the HD 4870 has been shown to surpass the performance of NVIDIA's GTX 260 line, and value seekers may choose to leave NVIDIA for a better price/performance point.

The Radeon 4870 uses GDDR5 to provide more video memory bandwidth than the GTX260, even though it has more RAM, a wider memory bus, and higher clocked memory.

The ATI Radeon HD 4850 512MB will drop to $129, and is designed to compete at the same price point as NVIDIA's GTS 250 512MB version. The Radeon HD 4830 will be replaced by another part soon at a lower price point.

ATI's price cuts are anticipated to take effect early this week. One of our sources indicates that NVIDIA and its partners will unveil GTS250 parts at the CeBit tradeshow in Hannover, Germany on Tuesday.

GTX 280

ATI Radeon 4870

GTX 260 Core 216

ATI Radeon HD 4850

9800 GTX+

Stream Processors

240

800

216

800

128

Texture Address / Filtering

80 / 80

40

72/72

40

64 / 64

ROPs

32

16

28

16

16

Core Clock

602MHz

750MHz

576MHz

625MHz

738MHz

Memory Clock

1107MHz

900MHz GDDR5 (3600MHz eff)

999MHz

993MHz GDDR3 (1986MHz eff)

1100MHz

Memory Bus Width

512-bit

256-bit

448-bit

256-bit

256-bit

Frame Buffer

1GB

512MB

896MB

512MB

512MB

Transistor Count

1.4B

956M

1.4B

956M

754M

Price Point

$349

$149

$199

$129

$169

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